Motto Azabu

Motto Azabu occupies a historic wing of the Metropol on Teatralny Proezd — and the neighborhood alone tells you this is a serious conversation. The restaurant was conceived by Denis Ivanov; the name references one of Tokyo's oldest and busiest quarters, where traditional eateries sit alongside contemporary bars and multi-story culinary complexes. That same mixed logic underlies the menu.

Our restaurant guide's team finds Motto Azabu one of the few places in Moscow where Japanese cuisine is served as living city food.

The space is split into several zones, each with its own character. On the entrance level is a room with the kitchen in view, a bar counter, and a separate room for private meetings. Below is the "Ue" room, styled as an immersion into the nighttime megacity — not the postcard-tourist Tokyo, but its living, slightly weary nighttime face. The interior was designed by studio Sisters' Design: warm-toned wood, raw stone, metal and graphics in the Japanese visual tradition create a restrained but thoughtfully considered environment.

The menu was developed by the brand chef of the KU bars, Vadim Malkov, together with Chizuka Shirahama. It's built on a union of washoku and yoshoku — that is, genuinely Japanese culinary tradition and the dishes Japan adapted from Western cuisine and made its own. This hybrid isn't a compromise but a distinct genre, long established in Tokyo's cafés and bistros.

Among the dishes that give a sense of the approach: monkfish liver with persimmon and lime — a delicate offal cut in an unexpected but precise setting; a chicken pâté with apple cream on milk bread — a Japanese take on a European appetizer; a wagyu hambagu — one of yoshoku's icons, a patty in a rich sauce, treated in Japan with the same seriousness as a steak; and a ramen with thin slices of wagyu, where the broth and the meat work together rather than compete. On its website, the restaurant states its own concept concisely: "the cuisine of real Tokyo." This isn't a reconstruction but a living reading — minimalist plating, attention to gesture, and no unnecessary noise in the table setting.

Motto Azabu in Moscow is an address for anyone interested in Japanese cuisine not as exoticism but as a self-contained culinary system with its own internal logic and history. The kitchen is open, and the atmosphere avoids showy theatrics — a statement in itself for a place inside the Metropol.